I’m sitting here at home, sucking down the final remnants of a “Top-Shelf” Margarita (made with some of the wife’s Cabo Wabo).. a fitting end to a fine day out. My son Nicholas & I just got back from a trip to the Lower Mainland of British Columbia for a JCNA Slalom event in Vancouver.
I haven’t slalomed since July of 2004. I of course took a year off from it due to the “Great Collapsing XK Engine Incident of 2005“… which ruined my year, and doomed my children to community college. I had a dim recollection of how fun it was, but today brought it all back. It is more than fun… it is a blast! I strongly suggest getting out and doing it yourselves. Ton of fun.
JCNA runs a standard course and timing gear, so you can compare your performance against other people in the US & Canada. Honestly, I’m not really looking for any sort of award, or national standing… to me this is just too much fun to NOT participate. I have an excellent car and feel that as a DRIVER I could stand a lot of improvement, so I really only care about how I do “against myself.”
It is about a 70-90 minute drive to Vancouver from my house depending on conditions at the border. Nick & I left around 8, and arrived at the 49th Parallel around 9-ish, only to be met with a snarled border crossing. They only had two lanes open, which is odd for a weekend (there are something like 8 lanes available) so people were queue jumping like mad in the outside lanes. I’m surprised there wasn’t any fisticuffs. I would have been there right on time, but I missed a turn on highway 1A, and ended up doing a big lazy “S” through Surrey, and finally dead-reckoned my way to the Scott Road Skytrain station parking lot (after a stop for some $CDN out of an ATM) where one of the BC MG/Jaguar clubs was holding the event.
Nick & I signed in, paid our fee, went through tech inspection, and prepped the 65E for it’s runs (this involves the giant “reverse Tetris game” of unloading all the spares, rags, tools, garbage, flotsam, etc from the Jaguar cockpit and boot. Once excavated, my pile was quite impressive. People were shocked at how much crap I had stowed away in such a small space! I am a master at Tetris! (and I wasn’t even carrying all my spares!)
I grabbed my camera and shot some stills of the folks who were making their runs. These included Bruce Cox, the fellow E-type owner from Burnaby whose new Pirelli tires I had smuggle^X^X^X^X brought over the border earlier this year. Bruce drives a very nice maroonish red Series 2 OTS. He & his better half Jayne have owned it since the late 60s. Good to see a “survivor” on the cones course!
Our turn came very swiftly, and Nick & I headed out onto the course after I’d handed my camera to Bruce to get some shots of us. Like I said, it has been two years since I last did this, and I was chanting out the mantra: “hourglass, figure 8, oval… hourglass, figure 8, oval… hourglass, figure 8, oval…” in my head, but of course it all fell apart once on course… somewhere I lost concentration and mistook one cone for another… here I’m thinking that I’m swinging wide at the bottom of my second lap when all of a sudden A CONE JUMPS RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY CAR!
I’m amazed at how quickly I stopped. I didn’t actually hit the cone, but I’m sure I scared it enough to give it second thoughts about jumping in front of me like that again! Of course, I had to reverse to get away from the wayward, evil, scheming cone, so I DNF’ed that run. (Kudos to Bruce for managing to capture that critical moment!)
We queued up to run again, and got some advice from one of the organizers. He refreshed my memory as to how to run the course, and told Nick to hold on to the grab handle. He got tossed around a bit, and in fact his helmet banged my right arm at one point, which is still sore as I type this nine+ hours later. We managed to complete our second run without mishap, and turned a respectable 00:49.291. We queued again and this time I concentrated on being smooth, and Nicholas did an excellent job of calling out lap sequence for me as we ran the course. This time we ran it in 00:47.560.
Given that my best time from 2004 was 48.6 this was my new “Personal Best”.
I still felt like I over-braked in the far opposite corner during the “figure-8” lap, so next time I concentrated on improving that. Result: 00:47.400.
Whoo hoo!
The last run, I figured I’d push it a bit more, and ended up getting some messy oversteer midway through the figure-8 lap that robbed me of a bit of time. Pushing that envelope! Final run clocked in at 00:48.140. Not bad actually.
After everyone’s timed runs were done, the course was open for “fun” runs, so Nick & I went out for three more, but this time we brought the camera in the car and Nick used the “film mode” of my digital camera to capture the event in full motion and sound. Unfortunately Nick is still pretty young, and not tall enough to see over the bonnet. The first time he held the camera up to his eye, and captured an excellent movie of the dashboard and the sky. =)
(BTW that run we turned a 00:47.940)
The next run wasn’t much better camera-wise, but I got my time down to 00:46.800.
Finally, after watching his results while we waited our next turn, I suggested that he hold the camera UP and sight along the bottom of the lens, and angle it as we approach turns.
The result was excellent.
It also turned out to be our best time of the day, and my best time ever:
00:46.105
Too bad I couldn’t pull that off when it counted!
I wanted to try to get a particular style of movie… the traditional “out the side of the car” shot, so I recruited Bruce to drive for me. He grabbed a helmet and climbed into the 65E. I don’t know why he was so nervous, but he started up the car and lurched into 1st gear before I even had my door closed, and promptly killed the engine. Poor Bruce… he probably thought he’d broken my car because it then refused to start. The starter was obviously heat-soaked, either that and/or my battery was so weak from last week’s alternator shenanigans that it just didn’t have the grunt to spin the hot starter… I’ve had the car do this to me before when very hot like this. (Did I mention that it was hot out today? It was!) I hopped out my open door, and rocked the car back and forth while it was in gear, then out of gear and hit the starter, and eventually hit the right spot where it would fire.
That crisis solved, we hit the course
It was fun to run it while not driving. It seems a LOT easier from the navigator’s seat! Bruce ran a respectable 00:52.250 and I had a fun time… capturing it mostly how I wanted.
We then reversed the Tetris game repacking the car, had to push/rock start it again(!) and bid adieu to Bruce & Jayne, and headed for home. We stopped in White Rock at a Baskin Robbins for some ice cream to cool us down (I parked the 65E on a down-slope in case it was still too hot, but after the our cool-down, it was cool too and started on the first try. The border crossing at the Peace Arch was insanely long, so we hopped over to the “Truck Crossing” and found it also backed up… we continued east on ‘0 Avenue’ towards the Lynden/Aldergrove crossing, and found it backed up too, though not as bad. It REALLY sucks to sit out in the open, surrounded by queued cars, baking in the hot sun on the asphalt. It seemed like an eternity before we made the 100m trip to the customs stop. Both us and the car were overheating and tired… thankfully the border guard didn’t ask me to turn off the car. He had searched a few cars ahead of us in the queue, and I really didn’t want to go through with that *and* suffer the indignity of the car requiring a push start! Thankfully he waved us on and we were very happy to be running in the wind again at speed. We angled east towards the mountains and took back roads up into the foothills seeking shade of tall Alders, Douglas Firs, and Western Red Cedars. It felt GREAT to get out of the sun. We eventually found our way onto SR9 and followed it home to Arlington.
Nick & I are tired… the sun just sapped our energy (we are both burned, despite frequent application of sunscreen) but we’re enervated and happy, having spent a great day out together.
Speaking of kids, there was a 16 year old out at the event today driving an MG B. He too looked like he was having a blast:
That is my favorite image of the day.
I think it is time for another Margarita.